RESTAURANT REVIEW: Go ahead, Eat My Catfish

If the name of your restaurant is Eat My Catfish, your catfish had better be worth eating.

And at the new west Little Rock location of the mini-chain (with outlets in Conway and Benton), the catfish is pretty good.

It's light, it comes in an excellent cornmeal batter and it doesn't have the muddy flavor you sometimes get in fried catfish. It's precooked, which is an advantage and a disadvantage -- it enables the kitchen to get it out to your table fairly quickly; it frees up the fry baskets for fried shrimp, fried chicken, onion rings and french fries, all of which are supposedly made to order. And it gives the fish time to drain so it's not oily. But it also means that it might dry out a bit while it sits under a heat lamp.

Catfish is the menu's centerpiece, but there are other items to try, mostly fried but with a couple of boiled/steamed options for those looking to avoid dietary fat. Most were better than average, and overall we enjoyed our dining experience, with a few minor disappointments.

The restaurant is a rebuild in what used to be a lingerie shop (Barbara Graves Intimate Fashions, if that helps you pinpoint it), in the upper corner of Breckenridge Village. So far, in lieu of an actual sign, a big red banner proclaims its grand opening. (Longtime restaurant devotees will recall that the same building housed John Barleycorn's Vision.)

The furthest of the four dining areas stretches surprisingly deeply into the back of the building; the two rear spaces provide, at least when the place isn't busy, a little additional privacy and a little less noise.

Initially, the back rooms were also better decorated. At first, the sealant-over-concrete floors that run throughout the restaurant combined with bare, gray walls and an un-upholstered, ramshackle booth that appeared to be either falling apart or perhaps hadn't yet been put into commission, made the front rooms look like an afterthought. The management has since added front-room wall decor and bolstered and upholstered the errant booth, creating a much more attractive first impression.

Despite explicit directions on a front-of-restaurant poster and an explanatory chalk board inside the front door, diners are still having a little difficulty in figuring out the ordering process:

Take a left at the entrance, view the menu chalked on a board in the entryway and also available in folded to-go-type menus in a wall bracket. Order at the register and get a number.

Get your drinks (wine and beer are in a cooler directly opposite the register -- we missed it first time through), silverware and little paper cups of ketchup, tartar and cocktail sauces at two stations, one in the front, one in the back. Plunk down at a booth (in the front) or a table, serviceable and comfortable (booth seating is a little low for shorter people; at tables, you're on slotted aluminum chairs).

Flat-screen TVs, one in the front, one in the back, show either weather or sports. Music was a little bit more uptempo and funkier at lunch.

Ordering from the "starters" part of the menu is almost a guarantee that you're going to end up with too much food, but if you must, and you're having trouble choosing, try the Appetizer Sampler ($7.99), which lets lets you try three of the six appetizers in one batch. We went for fried pickle chips, "fried grilled" cheese sticks and garlic fries ($5 each).

The cheese sticks, even though they come from a food service and not EMC's kitchen, were the cream of this crop, and one of the best things we had here. They're shorter and stubbier than the general run of cheese sticks; battered, not breaded; and inside, a tangy chunk of Monterey jack, firmer than and a big step up flavor-wise from the usual blah mozzarella. Don't linger over them, though -- they become a lot less interesting once they get cold.

We enjoyed the taste of the pickles; the slightly peppery batter, not so much. It was too thick for some of the chips, which were on the whole more chewy than crisp.

The garlic fries just didn't work for us. They smelled more garlicky than they tasted, because the mild and slightly bitter minced garlic, rather than being tossed with the fries, is just tossed on top, where it failed to cling to the ineffective Cajun-spice coating.

Though they varied slightly in quality between visits (that they were on one occasion just slightly burned on the edges bothered one member of our party), the other best thing was the hush puppies, firm, crisp-fried and not too greasy on the outside, fairly dense and very tasty on the inside. Magnify your hush puppy experience by doubling up on them as a side-item choice or ordering them in bulk -- $1.49 for six, $3 for 12.

We got our catfish alongside a half-dozen fried shrimp in the Catfish-Shrimp Combo Dinner ($12.89). It came out of the kitchen a bit awkwardly in two baskets -- the catfish and sides (a cup of very ordinary barbecue beans and a double order of hush puppies) in one, shrimp in the other. The catfish we described above; the medium-size shrimp came in a firm, lightly Cajun-seasoned, flour-based batter for which cocktail sauce wasn't necessary but which was a nice complement.

The po'boy purist in our party at first turned up her nose at the Shrimp Po'Boy ($7), largely because it comes with slaw and the house "fire cracker sauce" instead of lettuce and either mayonnaise or remoulade. Then she ordered it anyway and was moderately pleased with it.

The Bryant-baked French bread doesn't quite quite come up to New Orleans standards -- a bit more chewy than fluffy -- but it beats most of the hoagie rolls around here. The half-dozen shrimp, smaller and in a different breading from the house-made fried shrimp, were chewy and kind of bland. The slaw was nicely tart and the fire cracker sauce, which also coats the Firecracker Shrimp appetizer ($7), did provide a bit of a kick.

If you're not into fried seafood, try the Crab Dinner ($17.99), a pound (two large clusters) of steamed snow crab legs using a minimum, if any, crab boil, which means you taste crab and not what it's cooked in. This, too, comes with two sides and hush puppies. Another option we didn't get to try: Boiled Gulf Shrimp ($10.89), a half-pound of peel-and-eat ("regular or spicy") with one side and hush puppies. It's also available without sides as a $9.99 half-pound appetizer.

Speaking of sides, the paper menu has a front-cover photo that includes corn on the cob, which is kind of a nasty tease, because the restaurant doesn't offer it (and it would be a nice addition to the list of sides, which includes slaw, those very ordinary beans, a tangy tomato relish and fries).

For dessert, it's worth $1.99 to try one of Eat My Catfish's food service fried pies -- apple, apricot, peach, chocolate and coconut. They were a little oily but the crusts were nicely crisp; we preferred the apple, in which the apples were pleasantly firm, not too sweet and with distinct cinnamon flavor, to the chocolate, where the filling was a bit chalky and lacked chocolate flavor.

The restaurant has been filled at dinner -- not so many at lunch -- with a small army of employees, running food, clearing baskets, refilling drinks and performing other handy tasks for the benefit of diners, and thereby justifying the tip we left when we paid our tab up front when we ordered, which is always a bit of a risk. You can tell the veterans who transferred in from Conway or Benton because they're wearing older, different T-shirts. Food comes out of the kitchen quickly -- too quickly on one visit, where our entree baskets came out literally right on top of our appetizer baskets.

Weekend on 08/18/2016